Single Point of Access (SPA)

Working in partnership with Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) the Trust is trialling a ‘Single Point of Access’ (SPA) into adult community services as a six month pilot scheme.

The key objective of the SPA is to ensure the seamless, safe management of referrals for patients requiring Adult Community Nursing Services, either to potentially prevent an admission, support early discharge or coordinate care ‘closer to home.'

Calls are streamed into an urgent and routine criteria, with urgent calls telephoned out to the community nursing team within a few minutes to ensure a fast triage and an approriate response time to the patient. All routine referrals are emailed to the community team in order to reduce the number of calls to the nurses, providing less interuption to the patients.

The benefits to patients and health professionals calling the SPA is that calls are answered promptly, with all information taken over the phone and recorded safely."

Launched in April 2014,in its first three months the SPA took 25,000 calls 97% of which were answered in under 60 seconds.